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Show HN: Daemons – we pivoted from building agents to cleaning up after them

charlielabs.ai

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Show HN: Daemons – we pivoted from building agents to cleaning up after them

#1
For almost two years, we've been developing Charlie, a coding agent that is autonomous, cloud-based, and focused primarily on TypeScript development. During that time, the explosion in growth and development of LLMs and agents has surpassed even our initially very bullish prognosis. When we started Charlie, we were one of the only teams we knew fully relying on agents to build all of our code. We all know how that has gone — the world has caught up, but working with agents hasn't been all kittens and rainbows, especially for fast moving teams.

The one thing we've noticed over the last 3 months is that the more you use agents, the more work they create. Dozens of pull requests means older code gets out of date quickly. Documentation drifts. Dependencies become stale. Developers are so focused on pushing out new code that this crucial work falls through the cracks. That's why we pivoted away from agents and invented what we think is the necessary next step for AI powered software development.

Today, we're introducing Daemons: a new product category built for teams dealing with operational drag from agent-created output. Named after the familiar background processes from Linux, Daemons are added to your codebase by adding an .md file to your repo, and run in a set-it-and-forget-it way that will make your lives easier and accelerate any project. For teams that use Claude, Codex, Cursor, Cline, or any other agent, we think you'll really enjoy what Daemons bring to the table.

Show HN: Daemons – we pivoted from building agents to cleaning up after them
charlielabs.ai

Re: Show HN: Daemons – we pivoted from building agents to cleaning up after them

#4

Why couldn't these just be callable skills?

Callable skills can’t activate on a schedule or listen for events. Making a daemon which invokes other callable skills is a great use case!

I’m an eng on the team that built this, in full disclosure.

Re: Show HN: Daemons – we pivoted from building agents to cleaning up after them

#5

How does this compare to OpenProse, it looks similar? https://openprose.ai/ Are the two competitive or additive?

hadn't seen this before, but it looks like the daemon schedules and watch conditions could be helpful for activating openprose contracts.

Re: Show HN: Daemons – we pivoted from building agents to cleaning up after them

#8

[flagged]

Each daemon runs in its own isolate, but the output is typically shared state; eg multiple daemons contribute to the same PR from separate container runtimes.

It’s possible to make naive daemons that stomp on each other (as with a UNIX daemon), but they’re highly responsive to coordination instructions and generally do very well at additive rather than competitive contribution.

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